1.

  

During a lull in the rain, I took a walk to the marsh, just to be outside, and found a bedraggled little dog running circles around a man who lay amidst a clutter of tide debris. He wore an overcoat, shoes without socks, and refused help or money before I'd offered. When he asked my name I remembered my parents and answered don't have one, then asked about the dog: why was he so small; why didn't he bark? But the man said the runt wasn't his, was just another kind of lie I hadn't learned to tell yet. He told me he didn't have a name either, that he stayed too busy to engage in such vanity. Then he turned away, sighing, and fell back to sleep, and the rain resumed falling, even harder than before.

  

So I ran home, followed by that secret little dog.

  

By the time I arrived, the water had risen into the kitchen; my parents were lolling on the floor, splashing each other and trying to teach my little sister how to swim. In the living room my brother sat naked in water up to his chin and watched our brand-new color TV, which seemed to work fine, even half-submerged: Another sort of miracle. The house smelled of turkey and mashed potatoes, fresh-brewed coffee and apple pie.

  

Then my parents were doing the dead man's float, holding their breath so long that my sister was quietly starting to cry. In another room the phone was ringing, so I waded down the hallway to answer, hoping it would fall silent before I arrived.

  

  

2.

  

So much rain this year, she tells us, fish have started surfacing from their deep pools underground, up through caves and coral and soil, into the puddles that are flooding our gardens. When I wade through the back yard to the alley to dump the garbage, fish thrash and splash me and sometimes cause me to drop the garbage bag, which they ravenously rip to shreds. Soon we may be swimming off our back porch. And then the rains will stop, as they always do in winter, and we will plant our garden, fertilized this year by the fish which will have died and rotted—unless they are able to slip back down into their underground grottoes. Pelicans and anhinga have landed in our oak trees.

  

Our son comes home early from school these days, sits on the back porch and fishes until evening falls, when he should be doing his homework. He always catches something, which we fillet and fry up for dinner, though we don't much like the taste. Sometimes he lays fresh-caught fish out on the wall that surrounds our garden, or he tosses them up into the branches of our trees and sits silently on the wall there, waiting for the birds. He waits there as the sun sets while we bustle around the kitchen, cooking dinner or listening to the weather, to the news, or to old songs that still make us feel like children, pleased by simple harmonies, proud to know each word.

  

  

3.

  

Do you feel the deep breaths that move through your body, she wonders, do you know who sings at the back of your head? My memory is faulty, but my hopes are eternal, like the foxes that set out at dusk. They dance and forage around our neighborhood while we're shut up inside eating dinner. And when I say dance, I mean it, she says: have you ever seen them jump for a bird which has swooped low to the ground, and catch it?

  

She tells us she understands music much more deeply since that afternoon she fell off the high dive while no one was looking, hit her head on a kick board in the water and went down. Now she knows harmony and dissonance as well as she knows how to chew her food, and she knows all the words of jazz standards and even the most obscure operas, in their original languages. She says she doesn't even like that kind of music and starts to sing in other voices, back and forth, in harmony.

  

  

4.

  

We sat at the end of a concrete pier that stretched out into the St. Johns River and watched black skimmers circle, bottom half of their beaks zipping through the water, making a soft hiss, like gentle rain. In the grasses behind us, tall white birds stood still.

  

Years later we paddled kayaks out to a sand bar slung between two small islands where we could wade, watch birds, and gather shells. The water slapped from both directions, sending claps of small waves up into mist and breeze. We sat in the water there, rocking back and forth. Plovers flew near, rose up and fell into the waves, catching tiny food. A bedraggled pelican flew by, stabbing the swells but catching only water. High above, vultures and magnificent frigate birds moved in slow circles, almost out of sight.

  

  

5.

  

So I lie back in the water and look up at the sky and wonder what I would say to you if we met today as strangers living one of the many different lives we could so easily have entered, many times, with one of our other loves. I think you'd live in Colorado or California, and I might have ended up anywhere. We'd both be married, and I think we'd both have children—so our own children wouldn't exist, except as other people. Maybe we'd both be spending a few nights here on the beach on our way somewhere else. There'd be a summer storm and our sons, who would be about the same age, would rent boards and surf the larger-than-usual waves while we stood at shore's edge and watched. You'd have a pair of binoculars I'd borrow to watch them. I think I'd notice your eyes. Maybe your husband would be sleeping off a bad mood and maybe my beautiful wife would be having her fingernails painted again. Maybe I'd ask you to body surf with me, which you would demurely decline, since you wouldn't swim well; and maybe it would start raining hard enough to make the sand dance and our sons hoot with pleasure.

  

I see them out there now, floating out beyond the swells on their rented surfboards, laughing and yelling back and forth to each other with the same vivid energy that connected us, so many years ago. They don't even know each other's names.

  

Or maybe your son meets my daughter somewhere else, in another city where she's living for the summer while she studies anthropology, art history, simple food and love. Maybe he asks her to take a walk with him. It's beautiful there, walking at dusk beside that river, watching swallows scribble and dance.

  

Maybe they talk about their parents as they walk or maybe they don't say anything at all.

  

In that life we'll meet each other at their wedding; in that other life that's when I'll ask you to dance.

  

  

  

  

1.

  

Inside my body is another tiny me, smaller than a fingernail. But this person lives a few miles outside town, in a cottage in a field of tall grass with a small stream he can wade and even sit down in to cool off in when the day grows hot. The water is cold there as it runs over gravel from the wall of pines just a stone's throw away. Sometimes deer step from those trees at dusk when this other me is sitting on the back porch reading in the fading light, with a cup of tea. He wanders out sometimes in the near-dark and sits by the stream to look for the first stars. His wife stays inside, working at her loom, making tapestries and baby clothes, singing softly. Sometimes she works through the night and sleeps all the next day in their wood-paneled bedroom whose window looks out on the empty road. And no one plows that road in winter, so the other me inside me must walk all the way to town for supplies.

  

The food he brings back is delicious, and she is always waiting when he gets home—as though she'd forgotten who he is, what he looks like, and is pleased to meet him. Down in the basement the potatoes have started to grow with ever-greater urgency, aching for this other me to come down there and gather them. Up in the attic spider webs grow thick. Everyone thinks of these people with the names of trees, thinks of them turning vivid colors in the fall. We'll go out for a drive, someone says to his family, and visit the hills that are red and yellow-orange, and then we'll stop in town for cider and pie. The man and his wife wait for these visitors, though they live in that field of tall grass beside pine trees, whose colors never change much, only turning slightly darker.

  

  

2.

  

Every morning before the neighborhood swimming pool opened, I helped the lifeguard collect the water rats he'd caught in the mousetraps that often only stunned them. He'd grab the rat's tail and drop the rat into a brown paper lunch bag, scrunch the bag closed, and chuck the bagged rat as far out into the harbor as he could. Proud of his arm, he claimed he could throw a rat as far as the low-tide islands. But I never watched. He had slicked-back black hair and a cigarette behind the ear, and he thought he sang falsetto like a do-whop star. So he screeched all afternoon up in his lifeguard chair, combing and petting his glistening hair, working on his suntan. He never swam: it messed up his pompadour. Years later I heard he'd gone off to Viet Nam, that he cried now uncontrollably and punched the empty air. He was probably just a few years older than I was, but I flushed with pride when he called out my name or gave me the thumbs up when I did jackknives off the diving board. And the girls I had secret crushes on stood at the foot of his lifeguard chair, faces turned up to him like sunflowers, giggling and snapping their fingers to the radio tunes they all sang along with, the songs I practiced at night that summer, in my basement bedroom, while my parents lumbered and mumbled upstairs, turning off the lights and locking the doors. Then they called down goodnight to me, one after the other. My brother and sister were already sleeping. I could hear small animals moving through the dark, just outside my window, and I wondered what their lives were like. So I turned off my light and just lay there, listening.